If Everybody Recycled Cartridges We’d Save Barrels of Oil

By now everyone should know the importance of recycling manmade products. The benefits include reduction in the amount of non-biodegradable products in landfills, preservation of raw materials and reduction in the amount of fossil fuels used in manufacturing. Although the recycling of bottles, cans and paper is helpful, it is may be the items that are small and used less frequently that can do the most damage.

One such item is the ink or toner cartridges that can be found in almost every printer and copier in use in the world today. You may ask yourself why recycle toner cartridges? Like most people, you may only dispose of one a few times a year, how much of a difference could that possibly make? The answer: a huge difference!

Hundreds of millions of ink and toner cartridges end up in landfills each and every year. And while the three or four you toss in the garbage a year doesn’t seem like that much, consider that plastics in a landfill may not break down for 1000 years. That means if you throw away four cartridges a year for 20 years that leads to 80 cartridges that are not going anywhere for a very long time. Multiply that by the number of households disposing of cartridges and you can begin to see the problem.

Keeping plastics out of landfills may not even be the best answer to the question, why recycle toner cartridges? Perhaps the most important benefit to recycling or reusing them is the reduction in the amount of fossil fuels used to manufacture new ones. It takes almost a gallon of oil to make a single cartridge, but less than half of that to re-manufacture one. That means that recycling 100,000 ink and toner cartridges saves over 50,000 gallons of oil. That does not include the amount of oil saved because manufacturers only consume about 20% of the energy required to make a new cartridge when recycling a used one.

Why recycle toner cartridges? That’s because it is easy. The money, time and energy saved by recycling has encouraged many companies to make it easy for you to recycle your cartridges. Almost every business supply store provides drop boxes in their store and many even offer incentives to those who use a lot of printer ink and toner. Also, many of the companies that manufacture cartridges supply their customers with mail pouches so they can easily return the used ones to them for recycling.

Why recycle toner cartridges? because, it is a quick and simple way to help the environment and save money. If everyone would recycle them, millions would be kept out of landfills each and every year. Just as important, for every 1,000,000 cartridges that are reused, instead of being made new, over 25,000 barrels of oil are saved. That should be enough of a difference to make you reconsider the next time you are tempted to simply toss your empty cartridge in the trash.